Robert Louis Stevenson published Treasure Island in serial form in 1881-82 and in book form in 1883, originally writing it for his stepson Lloyd Osbourne starting from a treasure map they had drawn together. Jim Hawkins, the son of an innkeeper, comes into possession of a map showing the location of buried pirate treasure when a sea captain named Billy Bones dies at the Admiral Benbow Inn. He travels to the island with a group of gentlemen-adventurers, including the physician Dr. Livesey and the squire Trelawney, and discovers that most of the hired crew are former pirates led by the cook Long John Silver, who plan to seize the treasure for themselves.
What elevates Treasure Island beyond straightforward adventure fiction is Long John Silver, who is among the most carefully constructed morally ambiguous figures in nineteenth-century popular literature. Silver is a pirate, a manipulator, and a man who changes his allegiances with calculating flexibility whenever the balance of power shifts. He is also, within his own code, honest about what he is, never pretending to values he does not hold, capable of genuine warmth toward Jim Hawkins, and possessed of a practical intelligence that is far more impressive than the gentlemen-adventurers it repeatedly outmaneuvers. Jim's relationship with Silver, wavering between genuine affection and moral horror, is the novel's emotional core and gives Stevenson's adventure story a psychological texture that most of its genre lacks.
Treasure Island established many of the conventions of pirate adventure fiction so thoroughly that subsequent entries in the genre can seem derivative before you realize the direction of the influence. What the original offers beyond those conventions is Stevenson's prose, which is simultaneously economical and atmospheric, and the character of Silver, who has enough genuine complexity to bear serious reading. The novel is short, fast, and built with the precision of a skilled carpenter, every scene advances the plot and reveals character, nothing is wasted, and the island itself is described with enough geographic specificity to remain vividly present in the reader's imagination long after the book is closed.
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